Competitor plays foul with landing page

Messaged AdWords 2 days ago - nothing changed until now

[pmkpmk]

A competitor displays a different URL-domain in the ad compared to where you actually go when clicking the ad. It's like "www.company.com/products/widget" is displayed, but you land on "www.widget-brandname.com".

I emailed AdWords via the contact form 2 days ago, and NOTHING happened! Neither did I get a reply, nor were the ads disabled, nor was the landing page or the displayed URL changed.

Has anybody ever been succesful with complaints like these?

[JKelly]

I suspect the problem is ads start showing automatically on Google before being reviewed. Once they are reviewed they will be pulled due to display domain and destination domain being different. I have noticed the same thing and was told they will eventually be removed.

[kaylowe]

LOL - I got away with it for a few weeks, acutally, though I did not do it purposely. I had made a mistake and put ".com" rather than ".net" in the display URL. When google started their new affiliate policy, it helped for while b/c that was a different domain. But I got busted! Doggone, it was nice while it lasted, though.

Kay

[winglian]

well, i don't know if what I am doing is frowned upon, but i got the destination url doesn't match the display url because I got tricky and just put a capitol "I" where there was a "l" in the url. Since the font google uses is a sans serif font, they appear nearly identical. Of course I got busted. It seems weird that I didn't think of it before but I just went out and purchased the alternate domain with the "i" instead on an "l". hos will google look upon it if I use the display url as a capitalized letter "i" and actually use a url from my domain, redirect to CJ and then they re-redirect them to the final url that has the "l"?

Thanks
Wing

[pmkpmk]

Seems they got disabled now. Nowhere to be seen as of now - but other ads (where the domains are matching) of him are still there.

[pmkpmk]

Actually they were not disabled. I got an email saying - in essence - "Wich ads? There are no ads?". Then I emailed them back a screenshot, ond today(!) I got a reply saying that they finally found the ads in question but that they are in accordance with the AdWords TOS.

Hmpf.